A few years ago, 22-year-old Salma Niazi decided someone needed to record the atrocities the Taliban were committing against women.
She decided to be that someone.
"I chose journalism out of necessity," she told Hack.
"There were no female journalists in our area, I thought that there needed to be female journalists and so I started [practising] journalism."
Being critical of the Taliban comes at a cost, though. Salma was forced to flee Afghanistan, and now lives in neighbouring country with close ties to her home country.
'Everything done against women in Afghanistan is wrong'
Salma said it was difficult growing up as a young woman in Afghanistan in the shadow of the 9/11 terror attacks and resulting war in Afghanistan.
But since hardline Islamist group the Taliban returned to power in 2021, things have gotten infinitely more difficult.
"A woman cannot do anything. Can't study, can't work, even can't go out of their own houses," Salma said.
"Everything done against women in Afghanistan is wrong. They are not given the right to education. They are beaten in the workplace. They are fired from their jobs."
In August last year, Salma founded an all-women news website.
"I wake up in the morning and prepare reports for The Afghan Times with my five employees," she said.
Salma has labelled the Taliban "uneducated people" and said they were "afraid" of educated women like herself.
If she stayed in the country of her birth, she faced the very real possibility of being detained, tortured, or even executed by the Taliban.
"I am in exile because the Taliban threatened me, I was not allowed to work in journalism. I was forced to leave Afghanistan," Salma said.
Broken promises
When the Taliban returned to power following a 20-year absence, they promised to respect the rights of women and continue to let them participate fully in society.
Instead, there has been a slow erosion of rights. Women are barred from secondary school and university, and banned from working in most professions, including in medicine and in the delivery of aid via non-government organisations.
Girls have been banned from playing sport and are barred from appearing in certain public areas altogether.
"One woman we spoke to in Afghanistan described [the restrictions] as being sentenced to death in slow motion," Nikita White from Amnesty International Australia told Hack.
"The Taliban has decimated the rights of women and girls."
"When they took over in 2021 they promised they would let girls go to school. They never did. They said they would respect the rights of women and girls. They never have."
Nikita said it was unfortunate the international concern for women's rights in Afghanistan had "waned" in recent times.
"We really need people to continue to pay attention to what's happening in Afghanistan."
Censoring the media
After returning to power, the Taliban enacted media "reforms", including stopping the broadcast or publication of anything deemed to be against Islam or against the Taliban.
The changes have been described as censorship by the Afghanistan Journalists Center (AFJC).
Afghans "witnessed an unprecedented increase in incidents of violence and threats to journalists" in 2022 compared to the previous year, according to the AFJC annual report.
"The report finds a deterioration in press freedom in 2022, marked by detentions, threats, assaults, and restrictions on media outlets, journalists, and in particular women journalists."
The report said more than half of the 600 active media outlets had closed down since the return of the Taliban, and hundreds of journalists had fled the country.
"The Taliban's restrictive directives have opened the way to censorship and persecution, and largely deprive journalists of their independence," the report said.
Salma Niazi wants people in the West to know what is going with women's rights in Afghanistan, and she has vowed to keep reporting on human rights abuses.
"I do not see a good future for women in the Taliban rule. They … are forced to leave the country," she said.
